Is there a fundamental connection between New York's Elevator Repair
Service's 9-hour production of The Great Gatsby and a Kathakali
performance?
How can we come to appreciate the slowness of Kabuki theatre as much as
the pace of the Whatsapp theatre of post-Arab Spring Turkey?
Can we go beyond our own culture's contemporary definition of a 'good
play' and think about the theatre in a deep and pluralistic manner?
Drawing on his extensive experience working with theatre artists,
students and thinkers across the globe - up to and including an
hour-long audience with the Dalai Lama - playwright Abhishek Majumdar
considers why we make theatre and how we see it in different parts of
the world.
His own work has taken him from theatre in Japan to dance companies in
the Phillippines, writers in Lebanon and Palestine, theatre groups in
Burkina Faso, war-torn areas like Kashmir and North Eastern India, and
to China and Tibet, Argentina and Mexico.
Via a far-reaching and provocative collection of essays that is informed
by this wealth of experience, Majumdar explores:
- how different cultures conceive theatre and how the norm of one place
is the experiment of another;
- the ways in which theatre across the world mirrors its socio political
and philosophical climate;
- how, for thousands of years, theatre has been a tool to both disrupt
and to heal;
- and how, even within the many differences, there are universals from
which we can all learn and how theatre does cross borders
Of interest to theatre makers everywhere - be they writers, actors,
directors or designers - this book offers an oversight, as well as
interrogation, into the place of theatre in the world today.
